What we think: Don't sell valuable green parcels just to buy more

August 29, 2013

More than two decades ago, Florida launched a visionary and ambitious effort to buy environmentally valuable land for conservation. State lawmakers poured up to $300 million a year into those programs. About three million acres were acquired, but money dried up in recent years.

In this year's budget, lawmakers ordered a fresh infusion of funding for land buying — $70 million — but there's a catch: $50 million of the total will have to be raised by selling off other publicly owned parcels.

This isn't necessarily a bad idea, provided the land put on the auction block doesn't really need to remain under public protection. There are certainly pieces of property in Florida, for example, that aren't ecologically critical, but are owned by the state because they were included with other, more valuable acreage in larger purchases.

But is the state's lead environmental agency capable of separating the wheat from the chaff? There are good reasons to be skeptical.

Last month, the Department of Environmental Protection released a list of 169 publicly owned parcels that it is considering selling. The preliminary list encompasses 5,331 acres from state parks, forests and wildlife areas. There are more than a few startling entries, including:

•Two parcels, totaling 345 acres, from the 1,584-acre Neighborhood Lakes property that straddles the Orange and Lake County lines. The state purchased the land in 2006, under orders from lawmakers, to protect the Wekiva River.

•More than 2,500 acres in the Green Swamp, an extensive wetlands system that recharges the aquifer in Central Florida and sustains hundreds of species of wildlife. Lawmakers named the Green Swamp an "area of critical concern" in 1974, and the state has been buying, not selling, land there since then to protect it.

•More than 150 acres of barrier island property in Indian River Lagoon Preserve State Park. The lagoon is in desperate need of more protection these days, with record deaths among its manatees, dolphins and pelicans.

•Some 150 acres of mangrove wetlands in the Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserve. Audubon Florida says the land "serves as an important estuarine nursery ground."

DEP officials are planning to hold public meetings later this month and next month to consider comments about parcels on the list. They insist a lengthy process lies ahead before any property is sold. We can only hope.

Of course, state government wouldn't be under pressure to dump public lands if lawmakers came up with more direct funding for new purchases. With state revenues growing along with the economy, there should be additional dollars available for that purpose in next year's budget.

Until then, the DEP needs to take a listen to the many knowledgeable critics of this year's list, then take a serious, second look.